Two Walls and a Roof

by John Michael Cahill

  From my schooldays with Pad Keely I had developed such a terrible phobia about maths that I could not do any kind of maths at all, and in electronics they were a vital part of the study. When my first course papers arrived I discovered that I had to take on an additional study programme for maths because of my terrible fear. I would have to teach myself the subject from the start, and this I did. After I cracked the maths, the electronics exams came very easy to me as I loved what I was doing. In the end I got exceptionally good results and even surprised myself with the level of knowledge that I seemed to have.

  There was a nice twist to the day when I finally showed Nannie the many electronics exam results I had achieved. She didn’t understand the significance of the results, especially the City and Guilds ones, but the Diplomas she did understand, and knew they seemed to be very good. She was sitting in her old chair by the fire as I showed the certificates to her, and when I was finished she says, “John, I suppose it’s time I gave you this other certificate too”. With that she reached up to the mantelpiece, and from behind her large plate that she used to cook the Christmas turkey, she took down my famous disaster of an Intermediate Cert from Pad’s school. It was a watershed for me, and taking it from her, without reading it I opened the top of her range and stuffed my Inter Cert into the fire. As we saw the paper burn up, Nannie just smiled that knowing smile, and we never spoke of exams again.

  After being with Larry for a year or so, he felt that I should now learn to drive as I needed to be out doing house calls. By then we had become fast friends and all shyness had vanished. I loved the idea of learning to drive and becoming a real service engineer, and out of the shop at last. He had a red Mini Minor car. It was a real crock of an affair, held together by his mechanical ingenuity as he was as good as my uncle Kyrl with fixing cars. The gear stick had a heavy weight taped to it, preventing it from hopping back out of fourth gear. The wipers didn’t work, and the starter used to stick, so it had to be pushed often.

  It had a suitcase full of valves and parts laid out across the back seat, and if you couldn’t fix the TV, it was carried back to base in the passenger seat. On a bad fixing day there would often be as many as three television sets in this little jalopy. That Mini, which was affectionately known as ‘the bomber’, was a real fast car though. It could almost fly, passing out Mercs and Jaguars easily, and later I would drive it to its limits, getting numerous frights in the process. When Larry began teaching me to drive, we had a real close call because of my addiction to speed. Larry and I had been out doing TV calls for a few hours and it was getting late. We were also arguing about how some circuit worked while I was driving like a madman. I was really into the speed then, being fully infected by Hayes who was driving us around to dances at that time. Larry was constantly telling me to slow down, but he was equally engrossed in our argument. As we approached Doneraile town, I came upon a very unexpected bend of almost ninety degrees sharp. By then Larry was hawing on the windscreen so as to draw the circuit with his finger. I took my eyes off the road to see his drawing, and when I looked back up, the car was heading for a wall and very quickly too. Instinctively I sharply swung the steering wheel as Larry let out a yell and pulled on the handbrake so hard that it snapped clean off in his hand. I am certain that the car went up on two wheels as it sped all over the road. It was exhilarating and so exciting, and as it was happening I thought I should do this again, if we survived. All too soon it was all over though and it flipped back on the road with Larry cursing and calling me a ‘bloody’ lunatic, and worse things too. We soon recovered our composure and arrived into Doneraile. I tried to make him laugh by telling him that it was his fault for arguing with me, but he was quite shaken at our close call. We drove on to Buttevant in silence, and next day he told me to get a provisional licence as he had no intention of getting killed with me so early in his life. Up until then I had been driving with no licence at all, and no insurance either. It wouldn’t happen today though. When I did get my first provisional licence, he gave me the keys and said to get going as the only way for me to learn was to either drive properly or get killed trying; the choice was mine, but he was not teaching me anymore. Soon I was whizzing around at breakneck speeds every day. Later on each evening, with great sadness, I would have to return the car and go back to hitching home. Sometimes as a curtsey, Larry would ask me to give a customer a spin home in the car if we had just sold them a new television. That way I could install it and show them the workings. I remember one time I had to take a particularly prudish and posh woman home with her set. The new TV set was put in the back and she sat into the passenger seat as I got into the driver’s side. Our Mini had been through the wars by then and the bottom of the driver’s seat had a large hole with the springs showing through it. Larry and I were well used to this and didn’t care, but as we drove away the woman says to me all of a sudden, “Do you have teeth in your arse?” I thought I was hearing things and said back, “Excuse me?” She repeated her question, looking all serious and I answered, “No, not at all, why do you ask?” me turning bright red in the face by then. She says with a big smile, “Well I think you do, because your arse has eaten a hole in the car seat”. I didn’t know what to say then, and felt like telling her that Larry’s arse had been eating it far longer than mine, but I just went silent instead and stayed that way till I got to her house. I would never have guessed such an expression would have come out of the mouth of that woman, and later when I told Larry, he got such a fit of laughing and told me that he thought it was her way of wanting to see if she was right.

  During those learning years I had many close calls, getting almost electrocuted at least twice, but the closest one was completely outside my control. I was always guaranteed a spin home on a Wednesday from the father’s best friend, Arthur O’Lowery. Arthur was a lunatic driver too, and he was always in a rush home, especially during his dinner hour. He was a mechanic in the local garage, and would take different cars and vans home to Buttevant so as to test drive them. On this particular day he had a small van with a split back door and he was taking me and a local girl home. The girl was already seated as Arthur slowed down to pick me up. He did not stop though, but slowed to a crawl. I ran along behind him, pulling open the back door and jumping in. Then Arthur, thinking I was inside, pressed his boot to the floor and accelerated off at high speed. I couldn’t hold on, and fell out the back door straight between the wheels of an oncoming truck, which fortunately was not being driven by Arthur’s brother. It screeched to a halt with onlookers almost fainting in shock. As I quickly got up from beneath the number plate, the driver, by then as white as a ghost, kept apologising and asking me if I was alright. I assured him that I was, but that I had now lost my spin home as Arthur was half way to Buttevant by then figuring I would be ok. I think the truck driver was so relieved that he had not killed me, he took me home that day, probably thanking God for the rest of the day as well. To me it was not even worth mentioning to Nannie, but I can still see the front of the truck’s number plate.

  As the years passed by I became really good at this television work, simply because I loved every second of it. My aim was always to get the mother out from under the stress of her TV rental payments, and the fear of its repossession. Eventually I made her a television set from scrapped bits I had gotten from Larry. This was a hybrid set. It was a concoction of lots of bits from various models of TVs. It had a Philips chassis, a Sobell transformer, and mainly a Pye body. It was so unusual that I could not get a back cover to fit it at all, so it was highly dangerous as well. Initially it sat on a wooden box on her kitchen floor, taking up precious space, but the father was over the moon, now owning his own set. The mother was afraid of her life of getting electrocuted, and she kept on at the father to ‘sink it’ in under the stairs where it would take up less space, and would be safer. I didn’t want him to do this at all for two good reasons: one was that I used to steal the valves from it for my own growing private fixing jobs, and the second and
more serious one was that the Sobell transformers were famous for going on fire for no reason, and I didn’t want the house to burn down and confirm Nannie’s belief ‘that fire follows them Cahills’. I couldn’t tell mother my fears though, as she would immediately get rid of my concoction, and father would be devastated. She got her way and for a long time I used to have nightmares, seeing her house and all in it going go up in smoke. These dreams got so bad that eventually I made her a better set, and the terrors stopped. At the start it was a real mystery to her how her TV set was even more unreliable than the rental ones, but she used to get consolation from the fact that her son John had made it for her, and she told everyone that too. The truth was that it was extremely reliable, but I was increasing my ‘private customer’ base, and stealing an ever increasing number of valves weekly. I’d sneak in and whip out a valve, and later mother would call me and say, “John, the old TV is gone off again. Any chance you’d fix it for us?” I know the father was not fooled by any of this, but he never let on. For a long time I managed to avoid being spotted, but in the end she caught me doing the robbing and the game was up. All she did then was laugh, proud that her son was becoming a business man as well as an engineer, but I never stole another valve from her after that.

  Blessings upon you.

  Like every town in Ireland in those days, there were always some really hard luck cases around. Poverty was the norm for the vast majority of the people, but some were far worse off than others, even us. I have a vivid memory of one of these poor people. She was a young woman of about twenty five or so, and I feel that there had been some awful trouble in her life before she arrived in Buttevant. This woman lived up at the top of our lane in an area known as New Street. I think she was called Mrs Flint or some such name. I don’t think she was ever married and she just seemed to have arrived in the town overnight, or at least that’s my recollection of it. It looked like she had no family, was totally alone in the world, and no one seemed to care about her.

  I’m quite sure that she barely scraped by, living from day to day, eeking out a miserable existence in a town of little charity and no social welfare either. She had no income that I knew of, but I think initially she used to do a bit of house cleaning when she could get it. This continued until the moralistic hypocrites of the town saw to it that this work dried up, because they believed she had ‘callers’; gentlemen of loose morals who provided her with some extra source of income, though I’d be loathe to believe it was true. I remember her as the most gentle of souls, so meek and quiet. She wore an old coat, sometimes a small shawl, and always she had a dark silky scarf tied round her head. For some reason, I have always felt that kind of a look signified dire poverty to me, I don’t know why that is but it’s always a picture of misery in my mind. She constantly bore a look of sadness on her face and she seemed to be lonely all her life, having few friends, but my mother was one of those few at least.

  Despite the moralistic rumours, we never spoke ill of her at home, as neither the mother nor my father would have a bad word said against her. The mother seemed to have taken a liking to her from the beginning and to be honest so did my father. He was always a man who felt sorry for the less well off in our society, being a classic example of those people himself, and mother just saw her as yet another poor struggling woman, a bit like herself in those hard days. Mrs Flint was often talked about in Buttevant. I’m sure in those times its people were typical of those of any other small town in Ireland, no better or worse, with gossip being a kind of relief for those who have little, and Mrs Flint’s ‘profession’ was juicy news. While playing handball with Hurley I often saw her coming down the lane with her little canvas bag, her old tweed coat and that haunted sad look in her eyes. Hurley would cat call and I would tell him to shut up, and once we almost came to blows over his insults to her. Even then as a so-called tough teenager, that sad look she bore always affected me, but some years later I was to see it at close range in an incident that was organised by my mother.

  This event came about in a strange way, and it is one of the few deeds I did in my life which gave me a really great feeling inside. I don’t know why, but I always seemed to have had a soft spot for this poor woman subconsciously, even though we never once spoke in a conversation. If she was passing by we might just say hello, or give a nod to each other as she shuffled down the ballalley lane. One day while visiting my mother, she asked me if I would do her a great favour and have a look at the old television set that Mrs. Flint had been given by the St. Vincent de Paul. She said that it had been broken for about a year, and there was no way she could ever afford to get it fixed. Of course I agreed to look at it and soon arrived up at Mrs. Flint’s little house at the top of the lane. Her house which could be more accurately described as a hovel had a rusty tin roof with a small door and two small windows. One of them had a broken pane of glass in it and the frame was rotting. She had covered the hole in the glass with an old bit of cardboard and it stuck through the frame unevenly. The other window had an old lace curtain strung across it with two large holes in the lace, but at least it had glass and gave light into her tiny little bedroom. From the outside, her home looked like a picture of misery and belonged to the era of Charles Dickens and I did not like what was facing me at all.

  I knocked at the door, which was a half door if I remember correctly, and when it opened in, she seemed very surprised to see me. I said I was there to look at her television because my mother had asked me to, and before she could protest I was inside in a flash. I didn’t want to make a big issue of this job as I knew she had no way of paying for it, and so I had planned to pretend to be in a rush and fix it fast, then leave before she knew what had happened. Almost immediately she said that she couldn’t pay me. I dismissed it as nothing of importance, saying my mother was looking after any payment needed. She was still protesting saying she didn’t want my mother to be out of pocket either. But ignoring her protests I whipped off the back of the old set, telling her that I loved fixing things, and that it was she who was doing me the favour by allowing me have a go at such an old set. This was not going to be a fast fix however, as there was not even a spark of light coming from inside her television set.

  My words seemed to pacify her, and as I examined the set she went off tidying and I got a chance to covertly look around at her house. She had a small table which was very clean, being covered with a cheap oil cloth. She had two old chairs and some kind of wooden cabinet, not too unlike my mother’s one in our back kitchen, and that was it. I was embarrassed at this poverty as she was obviously way worse off than we had ever been. She seemed to sense my embarrassment as an awkward quietness descended upon us. Then, as if to break the ice, she offered me a cup of tea. I said I’d be delighted, and as she moved around I glanced across into her bedroom. It seemed to have had no door to it, and it felt dingy and cold looking. There were some old coats thrown on the bed and no blankets at all that I could see. An old bulb that was covered in cobwebs hung from the rafters, and I'm sure it had not shown light for years. Overall her little place did look tidy but was very, very cold. This coldness pervaded the whole house. I felt the damp clinging to my bones, and I shivered both inside and out.

  I wondered how she bore such misery day after day, and what she did with her time. From my dimming memory, there seemed to have been a spark of a fire coming from some kind of fireplace near the television set. This fireplace was really just a group of old concrete blocks forming a grate, and a black chimney. The spark must have been only a small spark as the coldness was beginning to get to me, and I never suffer from the cold but I couldn’t shake it off.

  Her old television was even worse than the worst of crocks. Over the years I had seen all kinds of junky TV sets, but this was the worst I had ever seen. All its fuses were blown and it had soot all over it inside as well as outside, no doubt from its proximity to the spark of fire, the smoke, and the slab of stone it sat on. I couldn’t fix it at all, and this was annoying me as each ti
me I got one part going a new problem soon arose in a different part. She said in her gentle voice, “Your tea is ready,” never calling me by my name, but perhaps she didn’t even know it.

  I sat at her little table and I wondered how I was going to tell her that I had failed. This failure was a big shock to me personally, as I had never failed to get a television set going up until then. Yet it was never going to be right and I knew it. The irony was that she needed a television set for company far more than anyone I knew, and she could least afford one.

  She poured the tea from a very black pot which was battered with age. I watched the weak tea fall into a clean, white, chipped cup that had a flower painted on the side of it. A half empty milk bottle supplied us with milk and she began to pour her own tea into an even more chipped cup; the guest had been given the best china. Why I remember these little details has always puzzled me, yet I do. I looked around for a sugar bowl as I liked sugar, and realizing what I wanted, she said, “I'm sorry, I don’t have any sugar tonight. Do you take it”? I lied and said I hated it, that it was real bad for you as it was poisoning half the country, and we were all better off without it. She gave me a knowing smile and sat down opposite me. I just could not tell her that her TV was never going to be right, so I said I’d have to take it away if she allowed me to, as it was very ‘sick’, and I tried to make a joke out of it. She didn’t laugh though. I suppose she was wondering what else could go wrong for her, but again she asked me about the cost, saying she didn’t want my mother to be paying her bills. She added the words, “Times are very hard these days, you know”. I nodded in agreement, finished my tea and told her not to worry about the money. Then I left with her box of junk.